Prof. Leslie Petrik
Research supervisor & co-author
Environmental and Nano Sciences group · University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Prof. Leslie Petrik founded the Environmental and Nano Sciences (ENS) research group in the Department of Chemistry at the University of the Western Cape in 2003 and has built it into a leading centre for nanoscience, environmental remediation and water treatment. Her record includes three granted patents, ten book chapters and some 175 journal publications, and she has supervised thirty Ph.D. and sixty M.Sc. students to completion and mentored twenty-one postdoctoral fellows. She was elected a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences in 2018.
The ENS group is where I first saw toxic mine drainage turned into nanoparticles that clean water — the moment the question changed for me from “how do we remove this?” to “what can this become?”. She is a co-author on that work in ACS Omega. I am grateful to her for a research home, and for showing a young African woman engineer what a career built on that question can look like.
Papers we co-authored
International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, 20, 12741–12752
ACS Omega, 7, 24423–24431
Working on something that overlaps?
If your research touches the same questions, I would like to hear about it — whether that is a joint paper, a shared sample set, or a conversation about where the work is going.